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sand, cement and gravel in the front door, through the house and into the backyard. Bright and early one Sunday morning, I started up the motor and began mixing the concrete. This was how I discovered the limit to my neighbors' patience and why I had a slab party as soon as it cured. During this time, I met my future wife, Catharine, who supported what had become an obsession for me. It wasn't long before she, too, was pull ing down walls and watching the dust fly. It was wonderful to be able to share the daily progress and watch, together, as my idea inched its way toward reality. Unsteady as you go-In order to reframe part of the existing second floor to make a bridge, I removed some of the floor joists from under the bathroom and cut off the upper half of the old stair. I put up sti lts to support the old tub, toilet and sink and ran planks across the gap in the framing. This meant that to take a shower, I'd walk up the half-stairs, heave myself up to a plank and swing around a corner and into the 4-ft. by 4-ft. cast-iron tub, with its swaying 10-ft. legs and garden-hose drain. Friends who would visit amidst the rubble would shake their heads in total disbelief. The new walls and floors went up quickly during the summer as I developed my skills at solo framing. I was lucky to find rowhouses nearby that were being gutted and, after getting an okay from the foreman, I salvaged enough lumber for all my floor framing, plus three flights of battered stairs. I had to hire subcontractors to do electrical , plumbing and HVAC work (licensing restrictions kept me from doing myself). They were at first perplexed by the design, but quickly took an interest in the job and made everything fit beautifully. By fal l, most of the mechanical and electrical systems were roughed in. One day in September, three months after my first architecture licensing exam, I got the letter I had been alternately waiting for and dreading that told me I had passed. As the rough work drew to a close, living seemed to become a little easier and less dangerous. But I reached a point about halfway through where I wondered if I'd ever finish. Sometimes I'd stand in the middle of the space and feel as if I could see through everything with X-ray eyes, knowing what had been done and how much more remained. I'd feel an overwhelming sense of heaviness-almost as if I were being submerged. Occasionally, though, I'd realize that an idea was actually taking form. In late fall, I took about seven weeks off from everything to cram into my head all the architecture I could, then flew back to Louisiana to take the second part of the exams. I finally got the news in February that I had passed and was now able to go out on my own. Maybe so, but I still had another eight to twelve months left to finish the house. 82 Fine Homebuilding A time-keeping skylight-One day in early spring, I was walking down the street in front of the house and heard the university clock tower strike noon. I looked down and noticed that the shadows from the street lamps were exactly parallel to the curb. Of course, at solar noon the sun shines from due south and, as L'Enfant planned for Washington, D. C., all the numbered streets (mine was 35th) run north and south. It dawned on me that this rowhouse design should respond to the coincidence of sun angles and the French engineer's city plan. So I designed a narrow skylight along the front wall, which is parallel to the street. I also decided to stop the upstairs floor an inch shy of the front wall. This would create a long, narrow gap between floor and wall, and I had great plans for it. At solar noon every sunny day, sunlight would descend through the skylight, through that gap and onto the wall in the living room downstairs. I had to build a low skylight so that it wouldn't be visible from the street. So I used insulated glass panels in a wood frame, rubber gaskets and a 2x3 wood sill. The existing roofing was metal, making flashing and waterproofing easy. I spent hours aligning the furring for the front wall, installing window and door trim (recessed so it wouldn't cast shadows) and figuring the proper width for the skylight and the opening in the floor. I wanted the skylight to appear to be the same width as the narrow slot in the bedroom floor when viewed through that slot from the living room. The skylight turned out to be about 8-in. wide. The moment of reckoning finally came, with the skylight glazing set, the floor slot finished, the sky clear and the time 11 :30 a.m. When I saw the first wide band of sunlight begin to creep down the wall below the skylight, I danced on the roof like a crazed Druid, then rushed inside to watch an angled band of light move down the wall and slip through the slot in the floor. At noon, the entire wall was washed in strong bands of sun (top photo, facing page) . Seconds after noon, the light quickly vanished like cellophane being peeled off the surface. The idea worked. The angle of the sunlight on the front wall changes with the seasons, making the equinoxes and solstices visual celebrations. Danger on the job site-By late spring, when I finished the skylight, Catharine and I had become almost comfortable with a house that still didn't have what most people would call basic necessities. But we sti ll asked friends and family over to share what was becoming a sort of protracted birth. One weekend when we were expecting guests for dinner, I was getting things squared away in the kitchen and Catharine was getting ready upstairs. Suddenly I heard a shout and saw, out of the corner of my eye, something falling from above. In the first split second I thought that Catharine had knocked a piece of furniture off the yet-to-be-railed bridge. Then I looked down to the hearth below the bridge and my heart stopped. There she was, sprawled on the plywood floor. For the most excruciating twenty seconds of my life I thought she was dead. This project I'd been so obsessed with caused the most crushing loss I could imagine. Just as I thought my head would explode, Catharine opened her eyes and told me not to move her, but to call an ambulance. When I got her to the hospital and all the injuries were tallied, she'd suffered a broken collar bone and many cuts and bruises, but no other damage. She'd fallen head-first 10 ft. from the bridge, missing the sharp edge of the dining platform by inches. We'd become so comfortable with what was really a dangerous site that I never thought to install temporary railings, thinking that the finished railings would be in soon. The fi rst thing I did when we returned home was to hammer on a railing. Luckily, Catharine was strong and was almost back in shape in seven weeks. A ceramic stream-Towards the end of the summer, as the rowhouse neared completion, I started thinking in detail about finishes. Catharine is a ceramic sculptor so I suggested during her convalescence that she design and make a custom ceramic countertop for the kitchen and several pieces for the main bath. She came up with a drawing of curvi linear porcelain pieces formed into a swirling mass that would follow the circular geometry of the kitchen. We enlarged the sketch to full scale on large sheets of tracing paper and laid them over one huge slab of clay that we'd rolled out over the plywood base. Once the tracing paper pattern was in place, we gently retraced all the lines of the design, leaving a clear indentation in the moist clay. Then, we carefully peeled off the tracing paper and, with kitchen knives, cut through the impressions to the plywood underneath. We covered the top with plastic sheeting and loaded it with a layer of plywood and dozens of bricks. Once a day for about three weeks, we'd lift off the covering and mist the slowly drying clay. We lost a number of pieces to cracking, but were able to retrace and cut new pieces to replace them. As the clay dried, it shrank, giving us the space we needed for grout joints . Once the tiles were completely dry, we carefully carved a code number on the back of each corresponding to its location on the paper pattern. We transported the tiles on pallets to Catharine's pottery studio where we glazed and fired almost 1, 100 pieces. Setting the tile was a lot more complicated than setting the square manufactured tiles we used in other areas. We worked with an epoxy mastic to ensure that the tiles would stay put, but it had a very quick drying time. We applied the adhesive with a notched trowel, then worked in a panic to fit the pieces in the right places, guessing at proper joint spacing.